I recently finished writing an organisational data strategy.
Not entirely from scratch. I had contributed to the previous five-year strategy, but this time I was the principal author of a complete refresh. That meant taking what had come before, deciding what still mattered, bringing in what had changed and trying to produce something that people across the organisation could recognise themselves in.
I think it is a good document.
That probably sounds like the minimum an author should be able to say about their own work, but strategy documents are not always easy to feel affection for. They can become repositories for every ambition anybody has mentioned, carefully arranged until nothing quite takes priority over anything else.
This one feels different.
A lot of work went into involving people properly. The process created better conversations and encouraged collaboration that had previously been more difficult. Different perspectives were brought together. The language improved because the thinking improved.
The strategy is clearer and more inclusive than the version it replaces.
And yet, while writing it, I found myself returning to a less comfortable question.
Was anybody paying attention?
There was no single dramatic moment when the problem became obvious.
The closest was a comment made during the review process that seemed to misunderstand the remit quite fundamentally. It came from somebody who had been involved in the relevant board for some time.
Perhaps it was an off day.
Perhaps the comment had been expressed clumsily. Perhaps I had not explained the position as clearly as I thought. One contribution in one meeting is not enough evidence to decide that somebody has been disengaged for months.
But it stayed with me because it pointed towards a wider uncertainty.
Did we have a shared understanding of who was responsible for what?
Could the people involved explain where their role began and ended?
Did being represented on a board mean that somebody understood its purpose, or merely that their name appeared on the membership list?
These are not criticisms of particular people. They are questions about the conditions in which organisational strategies are expected to operate.
A document can describe a coherent future while the organisation reading it remains uncertain about who has the authority, responsibility or confidence to make the necessary decisions.
At that point, the problem is no longer the quality of the writing.
Strategies are full of the language of ownership.
Someone will lead.
A group will oversee.
A service will be responsible.
Partners will collaborate.
The organisation will ensure.
These sentences can make responsibility appear reassuringly settled. Each action has a subject. Each ambition seems to belong somewhere.
But grammatical ownership is not the same as practical ownership.
Putting a team beside an action does not prove that the team:
- helped shape the decision;
- understands what is expected;
- has the authority to act;
- has the time or resources required;
- accepts the trade-offs involved;
- knows where its responsibility ends and somebody else’s begins.
A strategy can name owners without creating ownership.
That does not make the document pointless. It means the document has exposed work that still needs to happen.
One of the purposes of strategy should be to make difficult organisational calls more visible.
Who decides?
What should be done once rather than repeatedly?
What belongs centrally, and what should remain closer to individual services?
Where do standards need to be consistent?
Who is accountable when work crosses an organisational boundary?
What happens when priorities compete?
Without some interpretation of those questions, a strategy risks becoming a well-written description of cooperation rather than a mechanism for making cooperation possible.
There is a phrase that appears in almost every organisational conversation eventually:
We’re all busy.
It is almost always true.
People have operational responsibilities, staff to support, meetings to attend, problems to resolve and deadlines that were not created with one another in mind. Very few people arrive at work wondering how they can avoid having enough to do.
But “we’re all busy” can also become the point at which useful enquiry stops.
Why has this not moved forward?
We are all busy.
Why has nobody made the decision?
Everyone has competing priorities.
Why has the meeting been postponed again?
There is a lot going on.
None of these answers is false. That is what makes them difficult to challenge.
The problem is that busyness does not remove the need for strategy.
Busyness is one of the reasons strategy is necessary.
If everybody had unlimited attention, resources and capacity, there would be less need to agree priorities. Organisations could pursue every worthwhile idea and resolve every ambiguity when it arose.
Strategy matters because they cannot.
It should help determine what deserves attention when everything appears important. It should make some decisions easier by establishing direction in advance. It should provide a basis for saying not only what the organisation intends to do, but what it is prepared to stop, postpone or do differently.
“We’re all busy” should therefore be the beginning of a strategic conversation, not the end of one.
Busy doing what?
In service of which priorities?
Who has decided?
What is not receiving attention as a consequence?
The phrase becomes dangerous when it allows the existing pattern of work to avoid examination. Everybody remains busy, the strategy remains approved and the relationship between the two is never made explicit.
There is also a risk for the author.
Writing is one of the ways I make sense of complicated things. Taking fragmented ideas and turning them into a coherent structure feels like progress because, often, it is.
A good document can clarify relationships that were previously vague. It can expose contradictions, create shared language and make difficult choices visible.
But coherence on the page can create its own illusion.
Once the strategy reads clearly, it is tempting to believe the organisation has become clearer too.
The headings align. The responsibilities appear sensible. The argument moves from the current position towards the intended future. The document begins to feel inevitable.
The organisation itself may remain much messier.
People may interpret the same sentence differently. A responsibility that looks obvious to the author may cross several established boundaries. A commitment that survived consultation may not survive the first collision with operational pressure.
The danger is mistaking authorship for influence.
Writing the strategy is not the same as creating the conditions in which people can deliver it.
That does not diminish the value of the writing. It places it in proportion.
For all of these cautions, I do not think the answer is that strategies are pointless.
The process of refreshing this one was valuable in its own right.
It created a reason to bring people together. It made space for different parts of the organisation to explain what they needed from one another. It encouraged better collaboration and produced a document that is more representative because of it.
That matters.
Sometimes the most useful part of a strategy is not the final wording but the conversations required to reach it.
Writing forced us to examine assumptions that could otherwise have remained implicit. It required choices about emphasis. It made dependencies visible. It gave people an opportunity to challenge a direction before it became embedded.
The document is better because more people helped shape the thinking.
The next test is whether that participation becomes ownership.
Not ownership in the sense that everybody must agree with every sentence or carry equal responsibility for every outcome.
Ownership means being able to recognise the part that belongs to you.
It means understanding the decisions the strategy enables you to make.
It means noticing when everyday activity has begun to drift away from the agreed direction.
It means being willing to resolve ambiguity rather than preserving it because the boundaries are inconvenient.
Perhaps strategy is best understood not as a document but as a continuing act of attention.
The document matters. Language matters. Clarity matters.
But the strategy becomes real through what happens afterwards:
- the questions leaders continue to ask;
- the work that receives resources;
- the decisions that no longer need to be reopened;
- the responsibilities people accept;
- the standards that survive inconvenience;
- the things the organisation chooses not to do.
Attention is visible in repetition.
If a priority appears in the strategy but disappears from every subsequent conversation, it is not really a priority.
If ownership is recorded but every decision still waits for somebody else, ownership has not been established.
If the strategy calls for collaboration but structures continue to reward isolation, the document will not overcome the system around it.
This does not mean every delay is evidence of failure. People remain busy. Circumstances change. New pressures arrive. A strategy should guide judgement, not prevent it.
But it should be used.
Otherwise, why bother?
I remain pleased with the strategy we produced. I think the process involved people properly, improved collaboration and resulted in a much stronger document.
The harder work is not correcting the wording.
It is allowing the strategy to do what it was written to do: help people interpret their responsibilities, make choices and direct limited attention towards a shared purpose.
We are all busy.
That is precisely why those choices cannot be left unresolved.